The Effect of Employment while in High School on Educational Attainment: A Conditional Difference‐in‐Differences Approach*
| Published date | 01 June 2012 |
| Author | Stefan Speckesser,Arnaud Maurel,Lionel Page,Franz Buscha |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0084.2011.00650.x |
| Date | 01 June 2012 |
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©Blackwell Publishing Ltd and the Department of Economics, University of Oxford 2011. Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd,
9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
OXFORD BULLETIN OF ECONOMICS AND STATISTICS, 74, 3 (2012) 0305-9049
doi: 10.1111/j.1468-0084.2011.00650.x
The Effect of Employment while in High School
on Educational Attainment: A Conditional
Difference-in-Differences ApproachÅ
Franz Buscha†, Arnaud Maurel‡, Lionel Page§ and
Stefan Speckesser¶
†University of Westminster, Westminster Business School, 35 Marylebone Road, London NW1 5LS,
UK (e-mail: buschaf@wmin.ac.uk)
‡Department of Economics, Duke University, 213 Social Sciences Durham NC 27708-0097,
USA; CREST and IZA (e-mail: arnaud@amaurel.net)
§Queensland University of Technology, School of Economics and Finance, GPO Box 2434,
Brisbane QLD 4001, Australia (e-mail: lionel.page@qut.edu.au)
¶Institute for Employment Studies, Sovereign House, Church Street, Brighton BN1 1UJ, UK
(e-mail: stefan.speckesser@employment-studies.co.uk)
Abstract
Using American panel data from the National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988, this
article investigates the effect of working during grade 12 on attainment. We employ, for the
first time in the related literature, a semiparametric propensity score matching approach
combined with difference-in-differences. We address selection on both observables and
unobservables associated with part-time work decisions, without the need for instrumental
variable. Once such factors are controlled for, little to no effects on reading and math scores
are found. Overall, our results therefore suggest a negligible academic cost from part-time
working by the end of high school.
I. Introduction
It has now been over two decades since both D’Amico (1984) and Michael and Tuma(1984)
observed that employment among young people in the US education system is remark-
ably high. It was here that some of the first questions about the effect of working during
school on attainment were raised. Such questions are primarily concerned with whether
working during schooling can be seen as a substitute or as a complement to education.
Part-time work can be seen as a substitute to education because any additional increase
ÅThe authors thank Magali Beffy, Pierre-Philippe Combes, Xavier D’Haultfoeuille, Juan Jos`e Dolado, Denis
Foug`ere, Marc Gurgand, Cecilia Garcia Penalosa, Fabien Postel-Vinay, Jean-Marc Robin and participants at the
European Society for Population Economics congress 2008, the European Association of Labour Economics confer-
ence in 2007, the Association Fran¸caisede Science Economique conference in 2007, the GREQAM Spring Graduate
School in Economics in 2007 and in seminar at the Institute of Education (London, November 2008) for very helpful
discussions and comments.
JEL Classification numbers: J24, J22, I21.
Effect of employment while in high school on educational attainment 381
in time spent working leads, ceteris paribus, to a reduction in time spent on education.1
This, in turn, might negatively affect any educational outcomes. Alternatively, it may be
that working complements educational attainment via the acquisition of a variety of skills
such as improved work values, literacy and numeracy skills. If one assumes that such skills
are general and transferable, it is possible that individuals who work whilst in full-time
education might have a learning advantage compared to those who do not (Holland and
Andre, 1987). Most of the existing studies show that working particularly long hours dur-
ing school has a detrimental impact on educational attainment (Greenberger et al., 1980;
Marsh, 1991; Eckstein and Wolpin, 1999; Stinebrickner and Stinebrickner, 2003; Tyler,
2003). However, there is also evidence from the literature that working a small amount of
hours may be beneficial to studying. Working during school can thus both be a comple-
ment or a substitute to education, depending on the amount of hours worked (Steinberg et
al., 1982; Lillydahl, 1990; Oettinger, 1999; Montmarquette, Viennot-Briot and Dagenais,
2007). In these studies, there is an approximate inflection point varying between 10 and
20 hours of work per week.
On an empirical ground, the main difficulty in identifying and thus estimating the causal
effect of part-time work on educational attainment lies in the potential endogeneity of part-
time work. Indeed, labour supply decisions of students are likely to be related to unobserved
characteristics that are in turn related to academic attainment. For instance, conditional on
observables, students deciding to work part-time may have a lower unobserved ability
or motivation for schooling. In that case ordinary least square (OLS) estimates would
overstate any detrimental effect of part-time work.
Recent literature revolves strongly around correctly accounting for unobserved indivi-
dual heterogeneity within part-time work decisions. While articles by Eckstein and Wolpin
(1999) and Montmarquette et al. (2007) rely on a structural approach to estimate the effect
of working on educational attainment, most of the articles hinge on the availability of
an instrument for part-time labour supply (Stinebrickner and Stinebrickner, 2003; Tyler,
2003; Dustman and van Soest, 2007; Rothstein, 2007).
However, as already pointed out by Stinebrickner and Stinebrickner (2003), an instru-
ment causing an exogenous variation of part-time work decisions is very difficult to find
in this context. Up to now, even the best attempts to provide such an exogenous variation
are questionable. Using US interstate variations in child labour laws as an instrument for
students’ labour supply, as is done by Tyler (2003), might not be valid, since the adop-
tion of specific child labour laws within a state might be related to the emphasis placed
on educational attainment and therefore be also endogenous with respect to academic
attainment.2
Besides, even when the instrument is truly exogenous, the Instrumental Variable (IV)
estimates at best a weighted average of the local average treatment effect parameters
(LATE; Imbens and Angrist, 1994). In that context, the LATE parameters correspond to
the average effects of part-time work for specific subpopulations of individuals whose
number of hours worked is affected by the instrument (e.g. the pupils for whom child
1This argument is usually referred to as the zero-sum model in the literature.
2Given the widely spread belief of an adverse impact of part-time work on educational attainment, it might be
that a state placing greater emphasis on academic attainment (with, e.g. a better school quality) would adopt more
stringent child labour laws.
©Blackwell Publishing Ltd and the Department of Economics, University of Oxford 2011
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